Description
Date depot: 1 janvier 1900
Titre: Collaborative cultures of creativity: a socio-cognitive and intercultural analysis of engineering design teamwork in France and Japan
Directrice de thèse:
Françoise DETIENNE (LTCI (EDMH))
Directeur de thèse:
Michael BAKER (LTCI (EDMH))
Domaine scientifique: Sciences et technologies de l'information et de la communication
Thématique CNRS : Non defini
Resumé:
ABSTRACT
Creativity and innovation require collective efforts and collaboration between diverse social actors, with development of a “culture of collaboration” (shared values and practices). This research aims to understand relations between collaboration and creativity and, in a globalised world, between different cultures of collaboration, in creative engineering design of ICT. Engineering design is seen as a technical process, and also a social one (socio-cultural, interpersonal). Originality of this research resides in combining analysis of creative design processes, an interactional approach to collaboration, and an intercultural comparative dimension (France/Japan). The research is situated in the intersection between fields of design studies, cognitive ergonomics, group creativity and Intercultural Collaboration. Data will be collected in comparable collaborative design projects, with students in Telecom ParisTech and Tokyo Institute of Technology, using videos of groups and interviews of participants. Data will be analysed using combined methods for understanding creativity, collaboration and shared values, defining collaboration culture. Perspectives include identifying and fostering “best practices” of creative collaboration, extending the field of validity to other cultures of collaboration, and designing ICT for multicultural, collaborative engineering design. This doctoral research will be carried out within the framework of an international research collaboration, involving Telecom ParisTech and Tokyo Institute of Technology.
DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF PhD PROJECT
1. MAIN OBJECTIVES
This research will explore relationships between cultures of collaboration and creativity by adopting a comparative approach on the dynamics of interactions in innovative design projects. It will address this question in the specific case of creativity in engineering design, across French and Japanese engineering schools’ institutional contexts (Telecom ParisTech, and Tokyo Institute of Technology). Achieving this objective requires developing a theoretical and methodological framework for studying cultures of collaboration, and applying this framework to the comparative analysis of two situations for collaborative engineering design, across two cultures (France, Japan).
The research project bears on ICT in a double sense: firstly, the groups whose collaboration will be studied are involved in designing new creative and innovative ICT; secondly, the research will be relevant for designing ICT that facilitates collaboration in design, either face-to-face (e.g. CAD tools) or at a distance (Internet tools for communication and shared work).
2. STATE OF THE ART
This work is at the boundary of several active fields of research on design, collaboration, creativity and intercultural studies.
Design Studies. This field of research aims to establish foundations of design theory (e.g. Simon, 1973; Hatchuel & Weil, 2009) as well as to understand practices of design problem solving (e.g. Détienne, 2006; Visser, 2006). The most common conception of design problems is to consider them as “ill-structured” problems (Simon, 1973). The recent switch of focus in design studies, from individual to collaborative design, has entailed an evolution of the theoretical frameworks. Both Bucciarelli (1988) and Schön (1988) advance that designing is also a social process. Research theoretical frameworks in design studies have integrated the social and organisational aspects and the situated aspects of the collaborative design situations, , with the adoption of concepts developed in distributed cognition, situated cognition, and activity theory.
Collaboration studies. In the field of Cognitive Ergonomics of design collaboration and CSCW, a major and continuing topic of interest has been to understand the collaborative processes by which co-designers work towards common, negotiated design solutions. Empirical studies (Olson et al. 1992; Stempfle & Badke-Schaub, 2002; Burkhardt et al. 2008; Détienne, 2006; MacDonnell & Lloyd, 2009) involving analyses of interactive processes have also raised questions concerning the relationship between the design process, the collaboration process and the resulting design product, and this in various application domains (engineering design, software design, architectural design). They have highlighted distinctive collaborative processes that can be taken as a benchmark for good collaboration with respect to design, grouped along several dimensions concerning communication processes such as communication, task, group and reflexive processes.
Group creativity Studies. Creativity is a research subject well established in the areas of psychology, social science and management science (Edmonds & Candy, 2005 ; Paulus, & Nijstad, 2003) where research focus either on the person (a set of a person’s attributes (Sternberg, 1999), on the product (novelty and appropriateness) or on the pro
Doctorant.e: Vanhille Mohini